The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,36
that he knew she wouldn’t like remembering having made when she was back in full officer mode.
But she wasn’t a police officer now, any more than he was an ex-convict.
He was a man and she was a woman. And they wanted each other. This was a simple, beautiful thing in the world.
Desire.
It was honest.
Of all the things on an earth littered with deceit and betrayal, desire like this was real.
“Come back to my place,” he said, nuzzling her ear, nipping her earlobe gently.
“I can’t,” she said.
Suddenly, she was pushing against him. And even when he released his hold on her, she was still pushing at him as if she hadn’t realized that he had let go of her immediately.
“Pansy,” he said, his voice measured. “I want you. That’s the real answer to why I bought you a beer, and why I asked you to sit down. To why I followed you out of the bar. I don’t want her. I want you. It’s not about getting lucky, it’s about getting you. And I’m not a man that does relationships or anything like that. My last one soured me a little bit. But there’s no reason the two of us can’t...”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “I’m the reason. I don’t... I can’t... It’s not me, West. I don’t do this. I can’t do this. Not in this town.”
“No one would have to know.”
“They would,” she said. “Somehow they would, and I just can’t. Not right now. You’re...you. You’re new, you’ve been in prison, and I want to be the police chief, and there is no way that I can do that while I’m... I can’t.”
“You left the bar because you didn’t want to see me with her. Because you want me.”
“I want a lot of things,” she said. “I wanted my parents back for a really long time, but nobody dropped them on my doorstep. I wanted to feel normal, and I wanted to have friends, but I felt like an alien swimming outside of my body, and outside of people and society for most of my life. Because nobody but my siblings could ever understand what it was like to be me. I can’t have everything I want. I already know that. So I’m choosing to have this one dream. I can have this job. I can... I can make him proud. I was such a...such a terror when I was a kid and he never got to see how I grew up. And I’m not going to screw this up. Over...over a man. I’m not going to do that.”
She turned and almost ran away from him, headed toward her car. He hadn’t moved. He wasn’t chasing her. And he knew that the real truth was that the woman was running away from herself. Not from him.
Damn it all.
She got in her car and drove away, leaving him standing there with unsatisfied desire that he was just going to leave unsatisfied. He wasn’t even going to try to make it better. Not with the woman inside the bar, and not with his right hand. Because the only thing that would satisfy him was Pansy, and she’d said no.
He would have preferred it if she’d left him with another ticket, rather than this. Because that at least he could have paid.
This...this, he didn’t know what to do about.
And he didn’t like feeling helpless.
He had known that touching her would be a bad idea. He just hadn’t foreseen it ending like this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PANSY HAD CONSIDERED just not going to the family dinner on Sunday. But she had already skipped last week and it was going to be far more conspicuous than she wanted to be if she skipped again.
So she had managed dinner with everybody, and had even managed to talk about her pursuit of police chief somewhat normally, and all she could do was hope that she didn’t have I got my first kiss and it was with the absolute least suitable man alive written all over her face.
Even more terrifying was that somehow Sammy would find a way to wiggle it out of her without even knowing what she was wiggling.
Sammy was uncomfortably perceptive. She always had been.
When she’d come into their family she’d been a breath of shocking air. They had been so isolated since the deaths of their parents.
And then Sammy had appeared one day, like a fairy from the woods.
She’d been sixteen and all constant chatter. She had brought things like new sheets for the beds, chipped